For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Peer-Lewis in for Rachel Feldman.
Over the past couple of weeks, oil, specifically Venezuelan oil, has been all over the headlines.
It started late on January 2nd when President Donald Trump ordered U.S.
military forces to enter Venezuela and capture the country's President,
Nicolas Maduro, which they did early the next morning.
Last week, the country's Interior Minister said the action killed 100 people.
In the intervening weeks,
President Trump has made clear that at least part of his motivation for the operation was the nation's oil fields,
which are home to an estimated 303 billion barrels of oil reserves,
more oil than Saudi Arabia or any other country in the world.
To dig into the situation, we spoke with Amy Westervilt,
a climate reporter and executive editor of the Multimedia Climate Reporting Project Drilled.
We talked to Amy about why Venezuela has so much oil,
the history of the country's oil industry,
and how the subsession with oil is impacting climate change.
Thank you for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
You perhaps know more about oil in South America than any other climate reporter I've met.
What got you interested in it?
Actually, Guyana is what got me interested in it.